It seems like at least once a year we’re subjected to another claim that women on college campuses in America are at an exponentially higher risk of sexual assault than the world’s most dangerous countries.
Scientists often talk about the need for a study to be replicated to prove its results, but as we’ve seen time and time again with sexual assault surveys (that’s what they actually are) a flawed survey can be replicated a thousand times using the same flawed and disingenuous methods.
As I’ve written multiple times, surveys that use an overly broad definition of sexual assault are guaranteed to get large, headline-inducing, numbers. The latest version of this debunked survey method comes from the Association of American Universities. Outside of the frightening headlines, the survey, like all others of its kind, does not really show what it is purported to show.
The vast majority of the “sexual assault” allegedly reported by respondents (in reality, they’re asked if they’ve experienced a particular action and the researchers then call that sexual assault) are instances of “unwanted” contact such as a stolen kiss or possibly even an accidental touch. These instances are rolled in with forcible rape to make it seem as though the problem is larger than it really is. As multiple critics have observed, asking about “unwanted” conduct is unfair, as people do not know something is unwanted unless they try. Misreading social signals should not be considered sexual assault along the same lines as forcible rape.
We see this in certain results from the AAU study. At one point, students were asked if they had witnessed sexual assault and misconduct against other students.
“The most common situation respondents reported they observed was someone making sexual comments that made others feel uncomfortable or offended (26.0%), followed by witnessing a situation they believe could have led to sexual assault (15.0%), witnessing someone behaving in a controlling or abusive manner (13.0%), and witnessing sexually harassing behavior (7.0%),” the authors of the study wrote.
One of the other major things to keep in mind with these studies is that they are so often not representative of the national population. This study points that out, and also states that studies that have looked into the matter have found that students are safer than non-students.
“The variation across schools emphasizes the importance of not generalizing from these 33 schools to a larger population (e.g. national),” the authors wrote. “The schools participating in the survey were not randomly selected, and the rates discussed in this report should not be seen as representing student populations beyond this group of schools.”
“Furthermore, the prevalence rates discussed in this report should not be interpreted as an indication that attending one of these four-year schools is extraordinarily dangerous. There have been very few studies using similar methodologies that have compared the sexual assault rates of college students to sexual assault rates among adults of similar age who are not in college or graduate school,” the authors continued. “Of the few studies that have been conducted, researchers have concluded that, if anything, college students have lower rates of sexual assault than those not in college (Coker et al, 2016b; Axinn, et al. 2017; Sinozich & Langton, 2014). While this does not minimize either the seriousness of the problem of sexual assault and misconduct while attending a four-year school or its consequences for students’ well-being, it does provide a wider perspective on its correlate.”
One interesting finding in this survey that didn’t get a lot of media attention is related to certain findings showing how men are victims.
A large majority of students often say they didn’t report the alleged sexual assault because they didn’t think it was “serious enough.” AAU wanted to know more about this finding. The AAU survey found some interesting response. Nearly 70% of women said they didn’t report because they weren’t injured. But deep in this section is the finding that men don’t report sexual misconduct because “my body showed involuntary arousal.” And 30% of men who said they didn’t report an offense said it was “because of the person’s gender, I thought it would be minimized or misunderstood.” This is understandable, as men who have accused women of sexual assault are often ignored unless the woman claims she was sexually assaulted as well.
There are more problems with the survey, however, as Greg Piper at The College Fix reported. As I mentioned earlier, the broad definition of sexual misconduct helps pump up the numbers in these surveys to terrifying levels. From Piper:
The first major red flag: “sexual contact” includes “sexual touching,” which includes kissing, touching a “breast, chest, crotch, groin, or buttocks,” or touching someone “in a sexual way, even if the touching is over the other’s clothes.”
In other words, that last category depends on how a reporting student perceived any act of touching – with no regard for intent, duration or even body part touched. An accidental grazing of a shoulder could be reported by a student as “sexual touching.”
“Inability to consent or stop what was happening” appears 174 times in the survey results. It is defined as the student being “unable to consent or stop what was happening because they were passed out, asleep, or incapacitated due to alcohol or drugs.”
“Passed out” and “asleep” seem fairly objective. But “incapacitated due to alcohol or drugs” – which are involved in the vast majority of Title IX due process lawsuits I’ve reviewed – is not.
As Piper goes on to note, schools across the country have treated “any alcohol consumption by an accuser as strong evidence that she (and it’s invariably “she” in heterosexual disputes) could not consent.”
Incapacitated should be along the lines of “passed out” or “asleep.” Lowered inhibitions is not the same thing. Supporters of broad definitions of sexual assault like to use the analogy of drunk driving when asked why the accuser’s alcohol level matters but not the accused’s. But the analogy should go both ways. A woman can’t get out of a drunk driving offense by claiming she was too drunk to know what she was doing. It’s not an excuse.